Frances Grant: Australia's dark underbelly well fleshed-out

Australia is a large country but even its generous proportions seemed barely enough to contain all those Mr Bigs of Underbelly: The Mr Asia Story.

Perhaps it is because it was based, albeit loosely in some places, on real life that made the 13-episode "docu-drama" seem such a luxurious sprawl and something of a rarity these days: a show that took its time to let its multiple storylines unfold.

Unlike its hyped-up fictional cousins, Underbelly worked through the details and required quite some commitment from viewers, especially those not familiar with that epoch in transtasman nefariousness.

That probably explains all that often gratuitous naked flesh on display, as if the show didn't quite have the confidence the story itself would grip.

More rewarding - for those of us not titillated by all those jiggling breasts, and who would really rather have been spared George Freeman's blinding white buttocks, a shocking anomaly in the land of tan - were some fine performances, not least from Kiwi actors Anna Hutchison and Roy Billing.

As Allison Dine, Hutchison captured a mix of naivety and calculation, and love overridden by betrayal and survival instinct. Billing's sad circus clown face was the perfect mask for his character Bob Trimbole's ruthlessness.

For my money, I failed to find Matthew Newton either menacing or charismatic as Terry Clark, but merely rather banal. And some of the other acting was pretty ropey, particularly Dustin Clare, who played the psychopathic Chris Flannery with about as much subtlety as a road train up the Stuart Highway.

The star of the piece was Peter O'Brien, who played George Freeman as not mad, but mesmerisingly bad and dangerous to know, ruling the world in his budgie smugglers from the pool lounger.

The series might, as some have complained, have glamorised a world which was sordid and murderous but you couldn't help finding infectious the narrator's nostalgia for "the most colourful chapters in Australian criminal history" as she wrapped up last night's final episode.

Telly never lets us go short of a good grisly murder or five. Sunday Theatre has joined the homicidal party with the two-part Whitechapel, in which a modern-day serial killer appears to be following Jack the Ripper.

Terry and Aussie Bob might not have been shy of putting a body or two through the mincing machine but compared to old Jack's ways with a boning knife they'd never make butcher of the year.

The rather ludicrous premise is presided over by Rupert Penry Jones, off-duty from Spooks and starring here as an inexperienced toff, on the fast-track up the police hierarchy and needing a murder investigation under his belt. The poor young stuffed shirt not only finds himself having to snare the killer nobody could catch - or, rather, his modern equivalent - but he's also lumbered with the man they always bring in to play the sneering working-class hard man, Phil Davis, as his resentful sidekick.

To add to that, he seems to have some kind of neatness OCD, trying to introduce his squad to the idea of using deodorants and eating their five-plus a day.

To help him out, there's an English Eccentric, a creepy expert on the historical who runs Jack the Ripper tours for those voyeurs who like to wallow in the gory details. And that's what watching this mostly feels like, too. A murderous mystery tour among the cobblestones.